‘A society that cannot house its citizens is dysfunctional.’
Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

“The government is trying to take away housing allowances from 18- to 21-year-olds. Seriously man. No one should be homeless, it’s fucking bullshit,” Idris Elba told an 850-strong crowd at a fundraising gig for Shelter in London. Elba is right, it is cruel, ill-thought out, and likely to endanger the lives and future of the most vulnerable young adults.

The young are not the only victims of a raft of benefit changes. The benefit cap, which means total payments to a household must not exceed £20,000 a year, has seen thousands of families face cuts in housing benefit.

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Sarah, 35, told the presenter of BBC’s Panorama: “I’d just as well shoot myself. It’s how I feel. What is the point in trying to carry on?” Sarah’s benefits – including child benefit for her seven children, income support and housing benefit – were cut by £44 a week in November and as a result she fell behind with her rent. There was no way to make ends meet: benefits are at subsistence level, and if the bare minimum is cut further, you simply don’t have enough to get by.

Now Sarah sleeps on her sister’s sofa; her children have been separated and live with foster carers. In order to scrape back £44 a week from Sarah’s benefits, the government has broken up a family, separated seven young children from their mother, and are spending more than £1,000 a week in payments to foster carers to carry out the parenting that Sarah did.

This miserable, nonsensical predicament isn’t unique: around the country, thousands of families have had their housing benefit cut to as little as 50p a week.

The government has argued that the cap incentivises employment, but we don’t have an economy that could support full employment, and Alison Garnham, the head of the Child Poverty Action Group, points out that 80% of the households affected can’t work, either because of illness, disability or, like Sarah, caring responsibilities. “It’s the children who suffer,” Garnham told the BBC.

Families trying to get by under the cap are seen cutting down on heating, food and going to food banks with their children. One father applies for dozens of jobs – the only one he is offered requires him to be “completely flexible” – a zero-hours contract that could see him working anytime day or night, weekday or weekend, but with no guarantee of hours and pay. Trying to organise childcare around such a job is impossible.

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Some people who are capped will manage to find work and escape the cap: this would happen regardless. Most people claiming Jobseekers Allowance do so for a short period as they seek work, as the name suggests. But many more will fall into arrears, find themselves evicted, have their children put into care, live in temporary accommodation. All of this costs far, far more than the cap will save. Rather than investing in more affordable stable housing, the cap punishes people, pushing them into even more extreme poverty and unable to afford even a roof over their heads.

If the government truly wants to reduce expenditure on housing benefit, it should tackle the root causes. Making young people ineligible for housing benefit increases homelessness. Making families fall into arrears and face eviction increases homelessness. All of this increases the support they need, costing more and causing a huge amount of human misery. It’s an ideological and economically illiterate suite of policies that does nothing to build a housing system that works. A society that cannot house its citizens is dysfunctional; a society that deliberately chooses to force people into homelessness is incomprehensibly cruel. The government is failing the poorest, and worse, it is doing so by choice.

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